Hi @aggroed, thanks for the historical insights and for pushing forward the need for concrete plans.
BTW Feb 2nd is a Saturday (not a Sunday); you may wish to edit either the day or date. I hope it is the Saturday so can participate, as in Asia will be the dead of night.
My own work and interest is in the economic system that Steem has created. This could be a sub-committee of the blockchain committee but it needs the skills and insights of mathematicians, economists, game theorists, systems analysts etc before looking at the encoding.
The field of cryptoeconomics is new and faces genuine challenges in creating autonomous systems that can adapt to human behaviour without either crashing or heading towards some unwanted attractor. Nobody has as yet created such a blockchain economy, hence it is worth doing.
We have seen that hard forks that affect the economic code can have dramatic effects on the system, hence any changes must not be taken lightly or without thorough testing. What is needed is a few people who truly understand how the Steem economic system works plus some new blood from the areas mentioned above.
The Steem blockchain is agnostic to human qualities and value judgments; it merely reacts to blockchain actions. I can see the current drive is to add a human layer above the pure coin flow, with the development of new websites and communities. However, there also needs to be a long hard look at the coin creation and distribution so that the steem macroeconomics actually facilitates the microeconomics of both the individual members and communities.